Audi in F1 for 2015

[zac510]

Ulrich was just in the last Racecar Engineering magazine (or maybe the last one with the R15 on it) saying it won't happen.

[Slurms]

Yeah they get much better value out of Le Mans and Sportcar racing.

Why not dominate those sectors rather than spending significantly more money to maybe do ok in F1

[//j17]

There's actually a very strong case for this move.

1. Audi has got to the point where winning Le Mans/WEC again doesn't make very good PR. They've done winning. They've done winning back-to-back and multiple times. They've done winning with a diesel. They've done winning with a hybrid. What can they now do that's actually new?

2. Porsche are coming back in to endurance racing and it's hard to see why you would continue to spend the big bucks on two teams that are fighting one another. If Audi win you 'dirty' the Porsche brand. If Porsche win you dirty the Audi brand. Porsche aren't likely to win in their first season though...

Now if you retire the Audi brand from Le Mans and let Porsche take over with a few years of "First win for X years"/"Back-to-back wins"/"More wins than any other manufacturer" news stories what do you do to promote the Audi brand? You've already got VW and Skoda in the WRC/WRC-2 and still running SEATs in WTC, so what does that leave...?

[zac510]

Really by that logic they would have left when Peugeot joined and again then when Toyota did.

You can rationalise anything if you start with a hypothesis and then search for things to support it.

[Justaredbadge]

zac510 said:

Really by that logic they would have left when Peugeot joined and again then when Toyota did.

You can rationalise anything if you start with a hypothesis and then search for things to support it.

like global warming...

[m0rris]

//j17 said:

There's actually a very strong case for this move.

1. Audi has got to the point where winning Le Mans/WEC again doesn't make very good PR. They've done winning. They've done winning back-to-back and multiple times. They've done winning with a diesel. They've done winning with a hybrid. What can they now do that's actually new?

2. Porsche are coming back in to endurance racing and it's hard to see why you would continue to spend the big bucks on two teams that are fighting one another. If Audi win you 'dirty' the Porsche brand. If Porsche win you dirty the Audi brand. Porsche aren't likely to win in their first season though...

Now if you retire the Audi brand from Le Mans and let Porsche take over with a few years of "First win for X years"/"Back-to-back wins"/"More wins than any other manufacturer" news stories what do you do to promote the Audi brand? You've already got VW and Skoda in the WRC/WRC-2 and still running SEATs in WTC, so what does that leave...?

Interesting points but I'd disagree... I think your point 2 goes some way to answering point 1. By introducing another serious competitor in LMP1 VAG have raised to profile of the competition and increased the competitiveness of WEC/Le Mans. As long as both teams acquit themselves well on the track I see no real reason why one winning would damage the others PR, that is only likely to occur if one team is floundering badly. It would be very handy if they were competitive enough for one to win Le Mans and the other the WEC, giving both teams bragging rights.

If they wanted to move from Audi to Porsche they'd be much better off 'doing a Bentley' and scaling down their Audi operations to allow Porsche back or simply turning over their sportscar experts over to Porsche and starting afresh for a new F1 team; as opposed to setting up an entirely new LMP team at Porsche from scratch whilst maintain Audi-Joest.